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Introduction
I have devoted most of my career to developing a processing-friendly approach to syntactic derivation based on Minimalism (Chomsky 1995, Stabler 1997). In a nutshell: structure building operations apply Top-Down and Left-Right, i.e. incrementally (http://www.ciscl.unisi.it/top-down/). In this sense, linear order and hierarchy are related (Kayne 1994, Phillips 1996) and categorial selections/expectations drive Merge and Move in both parsing and generation (https://doi.org/10.4000/ijcol.1135).
Current institution
Additional affiliations
January 2005 - December 2011
October 2008 - August 2016
Microsoft, Lisbon, Portugal
Position
- Project Manager
Education
December 2000 - January 2005
Publications
Publications (75)
Subjects were traditionally analyzed as strong islands; however, recent research has highlighted a remarkable variability in their island effects. Focussing on intransitive verbs and adjectives, we argue that the islandhood of subjects is determined by their status at the syntax-semantics interface: subjects qualify as islands when they are interpr...
In this paper, we discuss the results of two experiments, one off-line (acceptability judgment) and the other on-line (eye-tracking), targeting Object Cleft (OC) constructions. In both experiments, we used the same materials presenting a manipulation on person features: second person plural pronouns and plural definite determiners alternate in intr...
Language assessment has a crucial role in the clinical diagnosis of several neurodegenerative diseases. The analysis of extended speech production is a precious source of information encompassing the phonetic, phonological, lexico-semantic, morpho-syntactic, and pragmatic levels of language organization. The knowledge about the distinctive linguist...
A robust set of experimental results from previous studies on both production and comprehension of subject relatives (SRs) and object relatives (ORs) in Italian have confirmed the well known different status of SRs and ORs holding cross-linguistically in both children and adults, with ORs harder than SRs, in various dimensions. One crucial finding...
Preverbal subject DPs in English seem to allow for the extraction of a PP complement, but not of a DP complement stranding the preposition of. Assuming a top-down computation, we argue that an extracted PP cannot be re-merged within a criterial preverbal subject (in the sense of Rizzi 2006), but it can be re-merged within a non-criterial subject th...
This is the final remark on the replies received to my target paper in the Italian Journal of Linguistics
In the present study, we investigate whether negation interacts with the set of alternatives that are elicited by why-questions. More precisely, we examine whether negation modifies the so-called contrast-class (set of alternatives) in the same way as negation interacts with other constructions, such as focal elements in declarative sentences. To t...
A significant debate has emerged in response to a paper written by Steven Piantadosi (Piantadosi, 2023) and uploaded to the LingBuzz platform, the open archive for generative linguistics. Piantadosi's dismissal of Chomsky's approach is ruthless, but generative linguists deserve it. In this paper, I will adopt three idealized perspectives -- computa...
The major contrast discussed in the literature to show an obviation of the wh-island effect often involves a bare wh- element in the role of the intervener (e.g. who) and a “complex” wh-phrase (e.g. which book) in the role of the moved item. This contrast is not minimal, since it is not sufficient to disentangle the role of D-linking (Pesetsky 1987...
The fact that Parsing and Generation share the same grammatical knowledge is often considered the null hypothesis (Momma and Phillips 2018) but very few algorithms can take advantage of a cognitively plausible incremental procedure that operates roughly in the way words are produced and understood in real time. This is especially difficult if we co...
The COnVERSA test (Test di Comprensione delle Opposizioni morfo-sintattiche VERbali attraverso la ScritturA) is a tool for grammatical competence assessment in Italian. It uses informal grammaticality (binary) judgments on written linguistic minimal pairs and it has been developed for testing deaf children, for which no suitable comprehension test...
In this study we argue that the appropriateness of an answer to a why -question, potentially bearing on multiple contrast classes, is mainly influenced by the focalized argument, which identifies the relevant reference set. The focalization structure, however, interacts in a non-trivial way with the thematic structure and its accessibility, suggest...
Expectation-based Minimalist Grammars (e-MGs) are simplified versions of the (Conflated) Minimalist Grammars, (C)MGs, formalized by Stabler (Stabler, 2011, 2013, 1997) and Phase-based Minimalist Grammars, PMGs (Chesi, 2005, 2007; Stabler, 2011). The crucial simplification consists of driving structure building only by relying on lexically encoded c...
This work explores two kinds of asymmetries within the class of nominal copular (NC) constructions under the unified theory of copular sentences deriving the two basic configurations from a unique underlying structure via raising, namely canonical vs. inverse. Using acceptability judgments, we first tested wh- sub-extraction from both determiner ph...
Welcome to EVALITA 2020! EVALITA is the evaluation campaign of Natural Language Processing and Speech Tools for Italian. EVALITA is an initiative of the Italian Association for Computational Linguistics (AILC, http://www.ai-lc.it) and it is endorsed by the Italian Association for Artificial Intelligence (AIxIA, http://www.aixia.it) and the Italian...
This article explores the phenomenon of pied-piping within the context of two assumptions. The first assumption is that a realistic natural language parser must assign incoming words incrementally into the syntactic representation as it is built during the parsing process. The second assumption is that this process makes use of Merge, the core recu...
In this paper we discuss two types of nominal copular sentences (Canonical and Inverse, Moro 1997) and we demonstrate how the peculiarities of these two configurations are hardly considered by standard NLP tools that are currently publicly available. Here we show that example-based MT tools (e.g. Google Translate) as well as other NLP tools (UDpipe...
Despite the fact that true reflexives always require a local antecedent, attempting an automatic referential resolution is often far from trivial: in many languages, reflexives are morphologically indistinguishable from impersonals and both particles are sensitive to the syntactic structure in a non-trivial sense. Focusing on Italian, we annotated...
Nominal copular sentences [DP V DP] can be distinguished in: canonical (1) subject+copula+predicative expression and inverse predicative expression-copula-subject (2) (Moro 1997).
(1) [SubjDPThe picture]i is[SmallClause_ti[DPthe cause of the riot]].
(2) [PredDPThe cause of the riot]j is[SmallClause [SubjDPthe picture]_tj]
Different syntactic as...
A cognitively plausible parsing algorithm should perform like the human parser in critical contexts. Here I propose an adaptation of Earley's parsing algorithm, suitable for Phase-based Minimalist Grammars (PMG, Chesi 2012), that is able to predict complexity effects in performance. Focusing on self-paced reading experiments of object clefts senten...
A progressive speech/language disorder, such as the non fluent/agrammatic variant of primary progressive aphasia and progressive apraxia of speech, can be due to neuropathologically verified Progressive Supranuclear Palsy (PSP). The prevalence of linguistic deficits and the linguistic profile in PSP patients who present primarily with a movement di...
The acquisition of clitic pronouns is critical for deaf children: they both start mastering them later than hearing children and keep producing non-standard forms longer (e.g. nominal phrases repetition, wrong clitic morphology and agreement, clitic omission). Here we analyze the written production of three profoundly deaf children elicited during...
Consider time as a total order among discrete events. If we look at human languages, a total order is always established among discrete events, which are the distinct pronunciations of the words (and morphemes they are formed by) in a sentence. Notice that this is not a necessary condition: if we think of the total order as a restriction imposed by...
Non-local dependencies connecting distant structural chunks are often modeled using (LIFO) memory buffers (see Chesi 2012 for a review). Other solutions (e.g. slash features in HPSG, Pollard & Sag 1994) are not directly usable both in parsing and in generation algorithms without undermining an incremental left-right processing assumption. Memory bu...
A cognitively plausible parsing algorithm should perform like the human parser in critical contexts. Here I propose an adaptation of Earley’s parsing algorithm, suitable for Phase-based Minimalist Grammars (PMG, Chesi 2012), that is able to predict complexity effects in performance.
Focusing on self-paced reading experiments of object clefts senten...
A cognitively plausible parsing algorithm should perform like the human parser in critical contexts. Here I propose an adaptation of Earley’s parsing algorithm, suitable for Phase-based Minimalist Grammars (PMG, Chesi 2012), that is able to predict complexity effects in performance. Focusing on self-paced reading experiments of object clefts senten...
We present results from an acceptability judgment study combined with an eye-tracking study on wh-islands with the aim of identifying the locus of the difficulty in the processing of wh-island.
The use of speech interaction is important and useful in a wide range of applications. It is a natural way of interaction and it is easy to use by people in general. The development of speech enabled applications is a big challenge that increases if several languages are required, a common scenario, for example, in Europe. Tackling this challenge r...
The volume is a celebration of the 50th anniversary of the publication of Noam Chomsky's groundbreaking Aspects of the Theory of Syntax.
Minimalism in grammatical theorizing (Chomsky in The minimalist program. MIT Press, Cambridge, 1995) led to simpler linguistic devices and a better focalization of the core properties of the structure building engine: a lexicon and a free (recursive) phrase formation operation, dubbed Merge, are the basic components that serve in building syntactic...
How complex is human language? Every chapter in this volume is devoted, in one way or another, to addressing this question. The great majority of the chapters focus on the question of whether languages can be compared in terms of their relative degree of complexity. The present chapter, however (along with the one by Trotzke and Zwart) takes a some...
While current discussion on NLP resources for the larger European languages focuses
on theoretical proposals to further develop them and on how to bridge the gap with the
most advanced systems [1], some, Mirandese being the prototypical example, still lack
the most basic resources. Prior to the 1990s, when the language was officially
recognized...
In these pages I will present a computational model of linguistic competence that
aims at being cognitively motivated and mathematically sound. Considering the
linguistic competence as the “speaker/hearer’s knowledge of his/her language”
(Chomsky 1965:4), I assume this to be expressed by a (generative) grammar: a
formal description of any possi...
In generative linguistics, a clear distinction has been drawn between (linguistic) competence and performance, where the first is the abstract «speaker/hearer's knowledge of his/her language» (Chomsky 1965, 4), and the second is the actual use of such knowledge, which can be somehow restricted by memory/attention limits. In these pages, I propose t...
This book represents the state of the art on rightward movement in one thematically coherent volume. It documents the growing importance of the combination of empirical and theoretical work in linguistic analysis. Several contributions argue that rightward movement is a means of reducing phonological or structural complexity. The inclusion of corpu...
In this paper we describe some technical and theoretical aspects related to a manually aligned bilingual treebank Italian (ITA) – Italian Sign Language (LIS) provided with both constituency and dependency annotation (Siena University Treebank, SUT). We briefly discuss the linguistic rationale behind the feature set and the dependency/constituency s...
work in a top-down fashion, contrary to the abstract bottom-to-top derivation of the standard minimalist framework (cf. Phillips 1996). Accordingly, we re-define Move as a top-down oriented operation which stores the moved,element in a memory buffer and re-merges it at the point of the computation,where the element is s-selected. Wealso re-define t...
This paper is an introduction to a grammatical formalism (Phase-based Minimalist Grammar, elaboration of Stabler's 1997 Minimalist Grammar) that includes a revised version of the standard minimalist structure building operations merge, move and the notion of derivation by phase (Chomsky 1999-2005). The main difference with respect to the standard t...
In this paper I will summarize five arguments supporting an explicit formalization of a minimalist grammar which is derivational and directional: derivational since constituents and dependencies are built dynamically, piecemeal, using structure building operations such as merge and move in a phase-tailored computation; directional in the sense that...
1 Left Branch Islands and the Connectedness Effect In this paper we reconsider the connectedness effect discussed by Kayne (1983), and illustrated in the examples (1)-(3). Kayne observed that in VO languages, left branch constituents are strong islands for extraction; 1 however, an illegitimate gap inside a left branch island can be rescued by anot...
The Minimalist Program(Chomsky 1995-2001) sketches a model that aims to be empiri- cally adequate and theoretically motivated but that does not fit in any clear way with specific performance algorithms such as parsing or generation even though much emphasis is put on "interface properties". In this paper I propose that a Minimalist Grammarformaliza...
Abstract Developing linguistic resources (such as lexica, grammars etc.) that can be used both in parsing and in generationis an extremely difficult task. Nonetheless,thinking about this option is useful inorder,to highlight ,properties ,of the ,linguistic competence ,that seem ,to be ,cognitively motivated,. The standard ,minimalist ,approach ,(Ch...
Computer based information repositories are becoming larger and more diverse. In this context the need for an effective information
retrieval system is related not only to the efficiency of the retrieval process but also to its compatibility to support information
seekers during a typical problem solving activity (Marchionini 1995). OMERO project (...
Although the research community pays little attention to (Inverse) Text Normalization (TN and ITN), this is an essential module in Text-to-Speech (TTS) and Speech Recognition (SR) systems. It has a significant development timeline and requires deep linguistic expertise. One of the main issues is ambiguity resolution, which is particularly problemat...
